Boys Chase Girls:

“Well.” She paused. “When you were fourteen, did your parents let you
hang out with girls?”

I told her that yes, they did. I think it would be a shock to her what sort of
things fourteen-year-old Americans girls do with fourteen-year-old
American boys. Not like I’d know — just because my parents let me hang
out with girls didn’t mean that they were super into hanging out with
me.
I have seen the movie Thirteen, though,
and I presume things at fourteen are even worse, with even more dramatic
shouting and crying.

Boys Chase Boys:

Transcript from my most recent tutoring session with Gristle:

He: You’re so smart, Jon.
I: [Polite smile.]
He: And your hair is like a Spaniard’s.

The ads next to my Facebook profile have recently become unspeakably
gay.

For those of you who aren’t on the Face’, a brief overview: every page
that you view on Facebook is accompanied by a set of ads. Advertisers
buy ad space and specify the demographic profile of
their target consumer. Facebook matches these data with
your interests and delivers ads that it thinks you’re likely to click
on. The intended effect is that you buy a lot of products after seeing
ads on Facebook, the actual effect is that the ad sidebar is a surreal
and somewhat discomfiting place where you get to see what sort of things companies
assume about people who, say, list Gravity’s Rainbow as one their favorite
novels. Turns out very few companies are aiming their marketing
specifically at Pynchon fans, and the ones that are are selling some
pretty weird shit.

This isn’t about that. This is about homosexuality.

First off, there’s a Facebook profile field called “Interested In” where
you can indicate whether you’re looking for men, women, or both. I don’t
have anything marked in that section, so Facebook has no a priori
reason to assume I’m gay. Whatever information they have
about my sexual orientation comes from social media magic (like Google
Buzz, which has certainly revolutionized my life!), though it’s possible
that they also have a guy whose job it is to look at profile
pictures all day and try to find the gays who are hiding in plain sight.

Who cares how they do it: Facebook’s made its decision. It’s
decided that I am gay. I’m basing this on three ads I’ve gotten over and over
again over the past week or so. Number one:

You can tell it’s gay because they use the letter z to spell Boyz, which
is something only gay people and M.I.A. do.

You can tell it’s gay because at the end it says it’s a Gay Comedy.
I know you’re thinking that the idea of a serious-minded talent manager at wilderness
therapy sounds hackneyed, as does the “Mr. Wright” romantic subplot, but
what if I told you that everyone in the movie is, wait for it, homosexual? Including the
“serious-minded” guy who is going to be suuuuper cute but not in, like,
a gay way, you know? Don’t worry you’ll love it, it’ll be just
like La Cage aux Folles.

You can tell it’s gay because the store is named “zazzle”, and the
logo is a huge ass rainbow. REALLY big.